This is especially important for COVID-19, a disease that kills blacks and Latinos twice as much as whites, according to U.S. federal data.
Eight out of ten deaths are over 65.
At the end of this week, David Diemert, an infectious disease doctor and medical professor at George Washington University, will begin recruiting 500 people.
The procedure will take two months. Washington is one of 90 national mND vaccine sites developed through the National Institutes of Health and Modern Biotechnology.
It will involve another 30,000 people and take at least two years to complete, its developers have said that they expect to offload the initial effects that can obtain emergency use authorization in a matter of months.
“I would say that our main demanding situations will be recruiting so many other people in a very short time, it is much faster than usual,” said Diemert, who oversaw previous trials of HIV and hookworms in other diseases.
“We are targeting others who are most at risk of a symptomatic infection with COVID, the elderly and others from communities of color.”
Past medical research in the United States has been plagued by focusing on homogeneous populations, skewing results, despite federal guidelines to include diverse groups, he said.
A study found that of 167 new medicines approved by the US between 2008 and 2013, about a fifth showed differences in response levels across ethnic groups.
Another example: for many years clinicians relied on a diagnostic called Breast Cancer Risk Assessment Tool, which was only validated among white women and drastically underestimated risk for black women who are more susceptible at younger ages.
Diemert added that, as a city with a 45 percent black population, Washington was an important site for investigation.
George Washington University teams therefore are going on recruitment drives—to testing centers, churches, and market places.
Part of their job is to try to win over trust in a community still leery toward drug research given the legacy of the Tuskegee experiments.
In those, doctors intentionally did not treat black men with syphilis so they could study its progression in the 1932-1972 program.
One thing Diemert wants people to know: according to earlier trial stages, the vaccine causes less severe side-effects in the elderly compared to young people, possibly as a result of less robust immune systems among the old.
The actual shot is two injections in the shoulder “just like you would get your regular flu shot,” spaced a month apart.
Leading the trial in the U.S. capital is “exciting and intimidating,” Diemert added, given the world’s hope of returning quickly to normal.